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Wednesday, January 29, 2014

John Turner Clinic - Day 2

It seemed like we rode longer on day two than day one. My group was right after the lunch break and all of us had gotten on about 10 minutes early to start warming up. John came out and started talking to us and giving us exercises to do during warm up so I think we did get an extra bit of time. He didn't have us do a lot of trot work, mostly walking with turns on the haunches and forehand and sidepassing. We went almost straight into canter work, doing walk-canter-walk transitions then doing canter-halts.

Moving right along John had us start jumping with a skinny brick wall set along the outside, with no standards. The first time through Buddy veered left two strides out and we had to come again but we got the standards put up. Not a problem then. A few others had runouts as well, so we went back and forth over the wall a few times.

The other fences were set up along the center line in a zig zag pattern. John had us do a bunch of different bending lines, starting with some longer ones and ending with an incredibly short one. I got yelled at for using too much left rein and not enough right rein. At one point as I went around all John was saying was "No left rein, no left rein!".

Then we switched up the lines and did a short, hard line bending to left he turned to me and said "You can open your left rein here, but only here". The line started off a short right hand turn from a skinny bending left in 4 to an oxer. The first time I did it we totally missed the turn, but then so did almost everyone else. Second time, we got the turn but Buddy was pretty tired and we pulled up at the oxer. You can hear on the video John saying he was ok with that, then he had the oxer put down to a vertical and we got it (mom missed getting that on camera).

I never realized that I'm a lot stronger with my left rein before. Buddy's gotten most of this week off, his lease girl did a flat hack with him today, but when I ride this weekend I want to set poles and practice the same lines, not using my left rein. John was a great clinician and I'm hoping they'll have him back down because I would love to ride with him again.